[jdom-interest] Namespace inheritance after cloning

Phil Weighill-Smith phil.weighill-smith at volantis.com
Mon Nov 29 09:03:39 PST 2004


Risking a flame or two, the approach we took as to provide an external
"clone" mechanism that could generate a copy of a (part of a) JDOM node
tree, modifying all the namespaces for the elements in that tree to a
namespace passed into the mechanism. This allows you to do what you want
without getting into the question of modifying JDOM's source to behave
in a non-XML-consistent manner.

Phil :n.

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 16:40, Elliotte Harold wrote:

> Eric VERGNAUD wrote:
> 
> 
> > Did it ever occur to you that someone, with a perfect understanding, could
> > simply disagree on the purpose of tools and API's and on programming style
> > and habits WITHOUT being wrong, but simply different ?
> 
> Not, in this case, no. JDOM's approach is the only sensible one. 
> Alternatives have been tried, and they've failed. Every single developer 
> and every technology for working with XML that has tried to make 
> namespaces properties of position rather than part of the element's 
> fundamental nature has quickly realized the error of their ways, and 
> adopted JDOM's approach. JDOM was not the first to do it, and it won't 
> be the last. But there are *no* alternative techniques for 
> namespace-aware processing of XML that have achieved any success.
> 
> if you want to convince me otherwise, you're going to have to do more 
> than talk. You're going to have to demonstrate that the alternative 
> approach actually works by producing an API that uses it, getting a wide 
> number of people to use it for processing documents that use namespaces, 
> and then showing that they are not confused and do not produce buggy code.
> 
> You don't have to do it all yourself. JDOM's open source. Fork it and 
> try for yourself. But this experiment has been done before and the 
> outcome's always been the same. I am confident that you or anyone else 
> who actually tried to use an API like this for any significant period of 
> time would very quickly see the wisdom of JDOM's approach.

-- 
Phil Weighill-Smith <phil.weighill-smith at volantis.com>
Volantis Systems
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